Book Reviews
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BOOK REVIEWS E.E. Rice (ed.). The Sea and History. Stroud, continuing habitation of coastal regions since Gloucs.: Sutton Publishing, 1996. xiii + 165 pp., prehistoric times despite threat of innundation. photographs, maps, illustrations, figures, tables, There is also consensus on the role of the sea index. £35, US $63, cloth; ISBN 0-7509-1096-8. in the transport of ideas mainly through ship• Distributed in North America by Books Interna• building traditions and navigation techniques. tional, Herndon, Virginia. Similar nautical techniques and technologies were invented more than once, at various times and This collection of nine essays originated in lec• places. They were dispersed by seafarers mainly tures given at Wolfson College in 1995 by between Atlantic Europe and the Mediterranean. Geoffrey Rickman, Elisha Linder, N.C. Fleming, Here the West was the influential source, because Anthony Laughton, Sean McGrail, A.J. Parker, of the conservative mentality of the Eastern Sarah Arenson, Sir James Eberle and John Mediterranean. Yet near-identical nautical inno• Keegan. Their aim was to investigate various vations in South China and Southeastern Asia aspects of the relationship between man and the were invented independently, thereby confirming sea, past and present in three geographic zones: the human tendency to arrive at similar solutions the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean and the to universal problems. Nevertheless, the Great Indian Ocean. This goal was achieved quite suc• Discoveries of the late fifteenth and early six• cessfully through an approach that employed teenth centuries were initiated by the West seem• several disciplines, including archaeology, his• ingly because of differences in the mentality of tory, literature, economics, coastal geology and European and Far Eastern cultures. physical oceanography, ship-building technology, Linkage between past and present are also harbour construction, seafaring and navigational discussed within the context of the issue of con• techniques. And without question, Rickman's trol of the sea. In historic periods, control of the comprehensive Braudelian overview of the Rom• sea was achieved only at the level of state or an Mediterranean, itself a multi-disciplinary exer• empire, under the command of a centralized cise, is an excellent choice as the opening essay. authority. The two examples examined independ• Though written independently of one an• ently of one another in The Sea and History are other, the articles share a consensus about the am• the Roman and British Empires. Although estab• bivalence with which human-kind regards the sea. lished by military might, the stability of both was On the one hand there is fear and mistrust of the symbolized by flourishing international maritime unknown and of the sea's destructive powers. The trade and the industries connected to it, which feeling was clearly expressed in the literature of could not have existed had it not been for the Pax the ancient Near East and still manifested itself in Romana and the Pax Brittanica. Underwater later ages. Yet there is equally obvious evidence relics of the Roman period, together with the of a more positive attitude towards the sea, as example of British shipyards, provide remarkably revealed by the lengths we have gone to harvest parallel evidence for the flourish and decline of its food and mineral resources, by commercial maritime mercantile activity of both empires. Yet, maritime enterprises, by technological innova• of the two, the British Empire was mentally and tions inspired by the sea, and by navigational culturally a naval nation, with much wider geo• skills developed through the ages. Indeed, the graphic scope than the Roman Empire. The human spirit has generally responded positively extension of the British Empire demanded a to the challenge posed by the sea, judging both by strong ocean-going navy. In the latter decades of the ability to sail great distances and reach new the nineteenth century, the character of this naval horizons even before the invention of the naviga• force, its command and the ideas of control of sea tion instruments, the marine charts and pilot power, went through changes in response to books despite all of the pericula maris, and by the profound technical innovations in the ships, 81 82 The Northern Mariner weaponry and communication employed by the migration to philosophy to trade and commerce. Royal Navy. Since the post-war period, these While among the authors there is general agree• changes have continued and, together with the ment of the primacy of economic relations in dissolution of the political frame of maritime creating the common cultural features which they empires, have manifested a sharp disruption with find, significantly more of the work is devoted to the past. In the new present, political and military the results of the economic contacts than to the control of the sea are treated by international contacts themselves. Language gets scant treat• bodies and organizations like NATO and the ment, an omission the editors think an important United Nations. How effective these new authori• one, but the scope is already broad, the catalogue ties are in the exercise of military power and extensive. control of the sea remains open to question. As expected the chapters vary in range, Overall, this collection is highly recom• complexity, value and in their contribution to the mended, both for the methodologies used in the central theme. Authors at times fall into the trap papers and for the provocative perspectives, of listing common attributes, of adding detail to questions, and answers they provide. detail, but doing nothing with the lists. Contribu• tions almost invariably include extensive notes Ruthi Gertwagen with citations to scholarship both old and very Qiriat Motzkin, Israel new. That volume of valuable bibliographic information makes the absence of a list of works Juliette Roding and Lex Heerma van Voss (eds.). cited all the more unfortunate. Religion and The North Sea and Culture (1550-1800): Pro• especially the Protestantism shared by the lands ceedings of the International Conference held at around the North Sea is noted by a number of Leiden 21-22 April 1995. Hilversum: Uitgeverij writers. It is C. Brown, though, writing on artistic Verloren, 1996. 524 pp., maps, illustrations, relations between England and the Low Countries photographs, figures, tables, indices. /65, US in the hundred years after 1532, who is the one to $35, paper (stitched); ISBN 90-6550-527-X. point to the force of the Reformation in breaking the much preferred and historically well-estab• During their Golden Century the Dutch created lished cultural ties of northwestern Europe with what amounted to an informal empire through the Mediterranean and especially Italy. Thrown much of northern Europe. They used their supe• back on itself, the region had to develop some• rior economy, financial skills and technology as what apart from the Catholic south. the basis for political influence in the region. The Predictably perhaps, the most rewarding Dutch left a strong impression and in many chapters are those, like that of J. Lucassen on forms. It is that impression the organizers of a migration or J.L. Price on regional identity, which conference set out to inventory in this volume of challenge the concept of a North Sea culture. thirty essays. The starting point is not, however, These offer a productive counterpoise to the well- the Dutch empire but rather the idea that there is articulated argument in favour of the idea and the a common culture around a sea. The paradigmatic use by L. Heerma van Voss of the Braudelian study is Fernand Braudel's of the Mediterranean framework. In the nineteenth and much of the in the time of Philip II and one goal is to show twentieth century history was about the national that Braudel's findings for the Mediterranean are state as the unifying force of European society. It valid for the North Sea and for a longer period, was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from 1500 to 1800. There is little doubt that the when that became true and more than one writer region to be considered is not just the lands points to developments in Great Britain that bordering the North Sea but also includes the caused a political and cultural reorientation of western and southern shores of the Baltic at least regions like East Anglia and Scotland away from to Riga. The authors from Denmark, England, the North Sea and toward London. In general, this Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, and Scotland may be a work of cultural geography but it is not attack a broad and unexpected range of aspects of one of geographical determinism. Writers see culture from architecture to painting to music to other constraints at work. drama to engineering to religion and piety to The editors, in their short conclusion, despite Book Reviews 83 misgivings and problems, assert that there was in butions of different kinds must have required a the period a common culture around the North generous subsidy for its price to have remained Sea. It is certainly at the very least a highly within reasonable limits. productive way of approaching the history of I am the last to criticise a volume of confer• northern Europe in the late Renaissance. Above ence proceedings for having solid introductions all, the work shows that the sea and rivers and and summaries in order to give a modicum of lakes and even streams were the avenues of conceptual and thematic coherence to the papers, economic and cultural contact. V. Enthoven but what is offered here is an unsatisfactory makes a cogent argument in his essay on the mixture of too much and too little. Successively, neglected history of the Scottish staple in the in addition to the conference papers themselves Netherlands that it was in short distance trades there are: a general introduction; introductions to that any unity is to be found.